Sunday, September 08, 2013

The Falling Leaves of Arabic Communism

The papers
of both novels started to come in my hands as I turn them and the two books
ended like trees in autumn, devoid of their fallen yellow leaves. The first
novel was bought from Algeria, the second form Iraq. Both about a life of a
communist. Both written by a communist. An ex-communist?

Both main
characters are ill. In the Algerian novel he had paranoid delusions and
spending the time in a mental hospital, the Iraqi novel he had paraplegia,
spending the time in a wheelchair.

Both are men
who are taken care by a European woman. Selene, the French, takes care of the
Algerian anonymous protagonist, and Maria, that nurse from Netherland, takes
care of the Iraqi protagonist named Saeed The Iraqi.

Selene asks
the Algerian, in Rachid Boudjedra’s novel “The Denial”, about the story of his
mother. The protagonist starts to describe his mother’s life and its
environment, mainly the house, which she does not go beyond. But he also
describes his life, his father’s and his brother’s, his uncles’ and aunts’.

Rachid Boudjedra

By
his way of talking about his mother he also describes the city. From his
narration you can see the signs of his mental illness yet you may get sometimes
bored or tired while the pages, the papers, the leaves of the book, keep coming
in your hand as you turn the book, and sometimes fall from your hands to the
ground. You will end in the middle of the novel of about 300 pages with a file
of individual papers each of which trying to find a way to escape from the two
covers of the badly printed novel.

The Iraqi
communist in Jasim Al-Mutayer’s novel “The Sick Communist” is named Saeed The
Iraqi and he had left Iraq in the 90s to Algeria, Yemen, and finally Syria in
which he get ill and the doctors in the Syrian hospital told him: “You will die
tomorrow.”

Jasim Al Mutayer

Since then he kept repeating each day that he would die tomorrow. He
was accepted as a political refugee in Netherland. After a while in the
hospital a nurse named Maria took him to her home by a wheelchair, in which she
lives alone, and started to take care of him.

He is confused
in Netherland since he cannot but love the country, yet the country is a
capitalist one. Maria, in spite of her habit of bringing the Iraqi newspaper of
the Iraqi Communist Party to him and of opening it in front of his eyes (his is
paralyzed and cannot hold the paper) and turning the pages for him, is not a
communist. He is visited by his Iraqi friends all of whom are communist
refugees in capitalist Europe. His friends open philosophical conversations
with Maria who answers them that she is not a philosopher and that the
difficulties of life doesn’t need a philosophical doctrine to understand them.
She adds: “It is the right of every human being to live a long life whether it
was in a crying wind or a smiling breeze.”

While the Iraqi
communist is still believing each day that he will die tomorrow, and while the
Algerian anonymous communist is still fighting his paranoid delusions, the
papers of the novels are falling one by one.